Remember the 80's when credit card companies would give anyone a credit card at like 50% interest, compounded minutely? Some people were just stupid... some mislead... but either way, it had to stop, because even though there was a mutual agreement, more times then not, people signed away their soul because of other dire situations.
Whatever. I don't consider protecting people from their own stupidity to be a major legislative priority -- all that ever does is end up hurting the rest of us who have some detectible level of brain activity.
If you want your email to be private, go get an account someplace that won't scan your messages. Hell, you probably *have* one right now from your ISP.
You don't have a right to free email. In fact, I would go so far as to say there ain't no such thing -- you're paying for it one way or another. If you find one certain payment method objectionable, don't use it.
It seems to me that companies ought to have a right to exchange services with
people on terms that both sides agree on. If Google wants to offer a gig of
email in exchange for being able to stick context-oriented ads in it, they ought
to be able to do so -- if you don't like it, buy your own damn email.
Hell, if Google wanted to offer me a gig of email in exchange for being able to
read my messages, print out the embaressing ones and pass them around their offices,
they should be able to do that, too. If I don't like it, I don't have to sign up.
But no, here in CA we never met a regulation or inhabition to business that we
didn't like. God forbid the legislature not spend yet more time not fixing our
insane budget problems.
* - Don't kid yourself. We still beat the hell out of your crappy state/country.
First, the article does mention using 2 stages to orbit -- a heavier lifting balloon and a lighter, larger space balloon. Between the two of them, the engineering and materials exist (apparently) to accomplish the target height.
Now, you're right: No matter how big the space balloon is, it can't lift you completely out of the atmosphere. But it can get you *real* high where the air is very, very thin and provide a neural overall buency (I can't spell). From there, the thrust of the ion engine will apparently be sufficiant to lift the payload up while accelerating it to orbital velocity. Sure, drag's an issue, but we're talking near-vacuum here so once you get moving it's not a big problem given the long firing time of the ion engine.
Well, I think #2 and #3 are what the ion engines are for. That's assuming that an ion engine can produce enough thrust to overcome the drag of the remaining atmosphere at that altitude (it very well may be able to -- I don't know).
Assuming the engine could overcome that drag, you'd be (a) starting at a much better height and (b) able to use a much more efficiant engine. It'd be a huge boon for moving things from earth into space. From there, it's just ballistics.
I was just mulling this over thinking about how cool it is -- seems more realistic than something like a space fountain -- when I remembered the Diamond Age.
Recall in the very beginning where the Vickis are riding in a blimp where the bag is full of vaccum instead of any gas? It seems to be that this would be an elegant one-stage-to-orbit vehicle, since you don't have to worry about things like gas expansion.
Anybody care to take a guess as to what sort of advanced materials would be needed for this sort of structure?
First, an error I noticed: It's not $1/ton to LEO, it's $1 per ton/mile. It's still really low, but it's a pretty significant difference.
Second, LEO isn't just *up*, it's also speed that keeps you falling back to earth. That kills the up-fast-down-fast idea. Are these space blimps (inflatible tech! Dr. Schlock would be proud) going to manage to accelerate a load from a relative standstill to LEO speeds using an ion engine (which has very weak acceleration) in just a few days? Unless I'm missing something, that doesn't seem very likely.
That aside: Cool idea. This sort of infrastructure wouldn't be as awesome as a space elevator would be, but it sure seems a hell of a lot more likely (cheaper, safer, possible without huge leaps in materials, etc). Once you're moving tons of material to orbit for a very small price (costs more to ship something across the ocean!), it seems like space exploration is ready to take off (no pun inte... oh, who am I kidding?) in a very real way.
He knows -- I remember reading after Ep. 1 that he sent around a memo acknowledging that they'd hurt the series with that steaming load of crapola and that they needed to do better with Ep. 2.
Well, Ep. 2 *was* better, but I think it also demonstrated that Lucas doesn't really understand the basis of his problems. He chalked it up to criminally bad ideas like Jar Jar and fixed those, but then went right back to his usual technique of crappy dialog and lousy direction.
What really needs to happen is at least part of what the article suggests -- the movie needs a talented director (aka, not Lucas). I'm not sure that Lucas' ego will let him do that; he's spent too many years basking in the praise of the original trilogy.
It won't happen. Frankly, I'm more keyed to see the next Harry Potter movie than Star Wars Ep 3 at this point, and that's a sad, sad thing to say about a new Star Wars movie.
The story's pretty much a rehash of what we've all been saying since we were walking out of Episode 1, but it's funny and hard to argue with. This in particular brought a smile to my face:
When Lucas shows up, knock him out, encase him in a block of frozen carbonite and put him out of the way somewhere until the movie is out in theaters.
The only problem being, of course, that you shouldn't let him out after Ep. 3 lest he decide to somehow sully my other fond childhood memories, perhaps by stealing my box of photos and defecating in it.
Anyhow, the article addresses the basic irony of Star Wars: That the guy who created it has also done the most the drive it into the ground, and that success has allowed him to do so more completely than ever. We all knew going in that Lucas can't direct, he can't write dialog, and yet here we go again...
Personally, I just thank God that this decade has had the LOTR trilogy to call its own. It was what we were hoping the new Star Wars movies would be.
Movement to pure hydrogen energy will only happen when a methods for producing free hydrogen don't require more energy than the use of the hydrogen itself produces. It requires energy to make that hydrogen folks. Hopefully all of you proclaimed physicists realize that.
I disagree with that.
The value of gasoline (or hydrogen) is that it's *portable* energy. A coal burning plant produces energy far more cheaply and efficiantly than my car does, but it's a real bitch to haul around with you.
Hydrogen doesn't have to be cheaper to produce than other energy sources, it just needs to be mile-for-mile cheaper than gasoline. That involved leaps in hydrogen production and the technology in the cars, but we're not talking anything too unreal here. And besides, since gasoline is a finite resource, that'll be a big help. The day after you can drive a mile in a hydrogen-based car cheaper than the same car with a gas engine, nobody'll buy gas guzzlers anymore.
As for your concern that using a fuel based on the most common element in the Universe will leave the world a barren wasteland: You do know what the byproduct of a hydrogen-based engine is, right?
It was actually a largely self-taught Russian scientist named Tsiolkovsky (his parents were Polish expats), from a letter written in 1911:
"Planyeta yest' kolybyel razuma, no nyelzya vietchno zhit' v kolybyeli", which translates to "A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever,". It's often misquoted as "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."
One place where Photoshop still owns the GIMP is in the availablity of adjustment layers.
One of the really cool things you can do with adjustment layers is work with an image you're turning into black and white and make it look like an honest-to-God black and white image (as opposed to merely a desaturated color image). In some ways, it's almost like taking an internal picture of your subject and adjusting the tones and hue on the fly, which can turn out some very nifty results. In GIMP, you just don't have that flexibility.
In the end what I really want to ask is, will Bugatti be responsible as to whom they sell the cars to and also add as many safety features as they can? If you have something that fast and add an inexperienced driver, a horrible wreak will ensue.
Most supercars aren't so much on the extra features. It tends to break down to basic (if awesome) car bits, the road and you.
Ferrari has tried to limit the distribution of their Dear-God model, the Enzo, to people less likely to wreck them by limiting sales of the car to people who have already owned another Ferrari (and who are therefore presumably somewhat used to having way too much get up and go).
I'm not sure about the overall success of the program, but from an anecdotal standpoint it doesn't seem to be working out very well -- there have been quite a number of wrecked Enzos cropping up around the internet, which I'd presume is a good percentage of the total Enzo population given the small production.
Most people just don't have the skills to drive a race car after a short how-to from the dealer.
Check the library.
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I never owned a single D&D book for the first couple of years that I played. I borrowed a couple of first edition AD&D books from the library. The beauty of D&D and AD&D was that you really didn't need the books. Once you got a handle on the rules as laid out in the PHB and DMG and a photocopy of a couple of the attributes tables, it was game on.
Of course, with the newer editions I'm sure they've tried to make it impossible to play without all 75 books, but back then it was pretty straightforward. Any details we were lacking were pretty darn easy to fill in as an eleven year-old.
I always figured that modules and etc. were created for older players or people with less imagination (and free time).
Holy cow, that's fantastic!
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's absolutely fantastic... It reminds me of that email going around about how Harry Potter is leading to a rise in Satanism. You'd think I'd be cynical enough to not be surprised by this stuff anymore, but every time I think I've seen everything, somebody somewhere raises the bar.
Reprint of the Harry Potter satanism email based on the article in the Onion. Gotta love (any seriously marvel at the midset of) anyone who can take this sort of thing seriously:
"I think it's absolute rubbish to protest children's books on the grounds that they are luring children to Satan," Rowling told a London Times reporter in a July 17 interview. "People should be praising them for that! These books guide children to an understanding that the weak, idiotic Son Of God is a living hoax who will be humiliated when the rain of fire comes... while we, his faithful servants, laugh and cavort in victory."
Borrowed very, very heavily
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
D&D takes a *lot* from Tolkien. This shouldn't be all that shocking -- Tolkien's stated goal with LOTR and middle earth was to create a sort of modern mythology, and he did so sucessfully.
In practice, however, D&D doesn't swipe so many theamatic elements from Tolkien as, say, White Wolf's Vampires game does from Ann Rice.
Takes me back a bit
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'd forgotten what a pain it was to play D&D in the 80's. You young'uns might not realize it, but for a while D&D was seriously considered as being directly linked to satanism by an awful lot of people. Those morons looked at an activity which was developing imagination, math skills and the ability to think on your feet and somehow twisted it into us getting ready to boil babies or something.
I remember that "expose'" where they made D&D out to be some big satanic training session because (gasp!) there were demons and devils listed in the Field Folio. And then some shooter someplace had a DMG in his backpack or something like that...
Parents just ate that shit up. I think a lot of them couldn't understand why we just weren't spending our time watching TV like normal kids. We basically had to operate under the radar or risk losing a several of our players to easily paniced parents.
I was in intern at the Chippewa Falls offices of Cray (well, SGI, but we all called it Cray) back in 1999.
I seem to remember hearing that the fluorinert they cooled the processors with was perfectly safe unless turned into a gas, in which case it was roughly as toxic as mustard gas. So, if there was ever an electrical fault in one of the machines that caused the coolant to boil off, there was a distinct possibility that you'd end up with a few dead operators.
Can anyone confirm/deny this? Actually, don't deny -- this is one of my best geek stories.
The computer Science Facility won't be bulging at the seams any more, and the people going in will be mostly people who are genuinely intereested in the computer science field.
Alternatively, Universities could see the drop in interest as a sure sign that it's time to gut funding for these programs. Also, you might find yourself in a position where the departments are comprised of the morons too dense to realize that paying coding jobs are going the way of the dodo.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever. I don't consider protecting people from their own stupidity to be a major legislative priority -- all that ever does is end up hurting the rest of us who have some detectible level of brain activity.
But if you seriously think that any American company is going to lock themselves out of the globe's 7th largest economy, you're kidding yourself.
You don't have a right to free email. In fact, I would go so far as to say there ain't no such thing -- you're paying for it one way or another. If you find one certain payment method objectionable, don't use it.
It seems to me that companies ought to have a right to exchange services with people on terms that both sides agree on. If Google wants to offer a gig of email in exchange for being able to stick context-oriented ads in it, they ought to be able to do so -- if you don't like it, buy your own damn email.
Hell, if Google wanted to offer me a gig of email in exchange for being able to read my messages, print out the embaressing ones and pass them around their offices, they should be able to do that, too. If I don't like it, I don't have to sign up.
But no, here in CA we never met a regulation or inhabition to business that we didn't like. God forbid the legislature not spend yet more time not fixing our insane budget problems.
* - Don't kid yourself. We still beat the hell out of your crappy state/country.
First, the article does mention using 2 stages to orbit -- a heavier lifting balloon and a lighter, larger space balloon. Between the two of them, the engineering and materials exist (apparently) to accomplish the target height.
Now, you're right: No matter how big the space balloon is, it can't lift you completely out of the atmosphere. But it can get you *real* high where the air is very, very thin and provide a neural overall buency (I can't spell). From there, the thrust of the ion engine will apparently be sufficiant to lift the payload up while accelerating it to orbital velocity. Sure, drag's an issue, but we're talking near-vacuum here so once you get moving it's not a big problem given the long firing time of the ion engine.
Assuming the engine could overcome that drag, you'd be (a) starting at a much better height and (b) able to use a much more efficiant engine. It'd be a huge boon for moving things from earth into space. From there, it's just ballistics.
And don't forget drag -- if you're high enough to float a blimp, you're still floating on some amount of atmosphere.
Recall in the very beginning where the Vickis are riding in a blimp where the bag is full of vaccum instead of any gas? It seems to be that this would be an elegant one-stage-to-orbit vehicle, since you don't have to worry about things like gas expansion.
Anybody care to take a guess as to what sort of advanced materials would be needed for this sort of structure?
Second, LEO isn't just *up*, it's also speed that keeps you falling back to earth. That kills the up-fast-down-fast idea. Are these space blimps (inflatible tech! Dr. Schlock would be proud) going to manage to accelerate a load from a relative standstill to LEO speeds using an ion engine (which has very weak acceleration) in just a few days? Unless I'm missing something, that doesn't seem very likely.
That aside: Cool idea. This sort of infrastructure wouldn't be as awesome as a space elevator would be, but it sure seems a hell of a lot more likely (cheaper, safer, possible without huge leaps in materials, etc). Once you're moving tons of material to orbit for a very small price (costs more to ship something across the ocean!), it seems like space exploration is ready to take off (no pun inte... oh, who am I kidding?) in a very real way.
Well, Ep. 2 *was* better, but I think it also demonstrated that Lucas doesn't really understand the basis of his problems. He chalked it up to criminally bad ideas like Jar Jar and fixed those, but then went right back to his usual technique of crappy dialog and lousy direction.
What really needs to happen is at least part of what the article suggests -- the movie needs a talented director (aka, not Lucas). I'm not sure that Lucas' ego will let him do that; he's spent too many years basking in the praise of the original trilogy.
It won't happen. Frankly, I'm more keyed to see the next Harry Potter movie than Star Wars Ep 3 at this point, and that's a sad, sad thing to say about a new Star Wars movie.
When Lucas shows up, knock him out, encase him in a block of frozen carbonite and put him out of the way somewhere until the movie is out in theaters.
The only problem being, of course, that you shouldn't let him out after Ep. 3 lest he decide to somehow sully my other fond childhood memories, perhaps by stealing my box of photos and defecating in it.
Anyhow, the article addresses the basic irony of Star Wars: That the guy who created it has also done the most the drive it into the ground, and that success has allowed him to do so more completely than ever. We all knew going in that Lucas can't direct, he can't write dialog, and yet here we go again...
Personally, I just thank God that this decade has had the LOTR trilogy to call its own. It was what we were hoping the new Star Wars movies would be.
Get the good parking spots at the mall, Yoda does. Mmmm... Good parking spots...
I disagree with that.
The value of gasoline (or hydrogen) is that it's *portable* energy. A coal burning plant produces energy far more cheaply and efficiantly than my car does, but it's a real bitch to haul around with you.
Hydrogen doesn't have to be cheaper to produce than other energy sources, it just needs to be mile-for-mile cheaper than gasoline. That involved leaps in hydrogen production and the technology in the cars, but we're not talking anything too unreal here. And besides, since gasoline is a finite resource, that'll be a big help. The day after you can drive a mile in a hydrogen-based car cheaper than the same car with a gas engine, nobody'll buy gas guzzlers anymore.
As for your concern that using a fuel based on the most common element in the Universe will leave the world a barren wasteland: You do know what the byproduct of a hydrogen-based engine is, right?
"Planyeta yest' kolybyel razuma, no nyelzya vietchno zhit' v kolybyeli", which translates to "A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever,". It's often misquoted as "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."
One of the really cool things you can do with adjustment layers is work with an image you're turning into black and white and make it look like an honest-to-God black and white image (as opposed to merely a desaturated color image). In some ways, it's almost like taking an internal picture of your subject and adjusting the tones and hue on the fly, which can turn out some very nifty results. In GIMP, you just don't have that flexibility.
Most supercars aren't so much on the extra features. It tends to break down to basic (if awesome) car bits, the road and you.
Ferrari has tried to limit the distribution of their Dear-God model, the Enzo, to people less likely to wreck them by limiting sales of the car to people who have already owned another Ferrari (and who are therefore presumably somewhat used to having way too much get up and go).
I'm not sure about the overall success of the program, but from an anecdotal standpoint it doesn't seem to be working out very well -- there have been quite a number of wrecked Enzos cropping up around the internet, which I'd presume is a good percentage of the total Enzo population given the small production.
Most people just don't have the skills to drive a race car after a short how-to from the dealer.
Of course, with the newer editions I'm sure they've tried to make it impossible to play without all 75 books, but back then it was pretty straightforward. Any details we were lacking were pretty darn easy to fill in as an eleven year-old.
I always figured that modules and etc. were created for older players or people with less imagination (and free time).
Reprint of the Harry Potter satanism email based on the article in the Onion. Gotta love (any seriously marvel at the midset of) anyone who can take this sort of thing seriously:
"I think it's absolute rubbish to protest children's books on the grounds that they are luring children to Satan," Rowling told a London Times reporter in a July 17 interview. "People should be praising them for that! These books guide children to an understanding that the weak, idiotic Son Of God is a living hoax who will be humiliated when the rain of fire comes ... while we, his faithful servants, laugh and cavort in victory."
In practice, however, D&D doesn't swipe so many theamatic elements from Tolkien as, say, White Wolf's Vampires game does from Ann Rice.
I remember that "expose'" where they made D&D out to be some big satanic training session because (gasp!) there were demons and devils listed in the Field Folio. And then some shooter someplace had a DMG in his backpack or something like that...
Parents just ate that shit up. I think a lot of them couldn't understand why we just weren't spending our time watching TV like normal kids. We basically had to operate under the radar or risk losing a several of our players to easily paniced parents.
I seem to remember hearing that the fluorinert they cooled the processors with was perfectly safe unless turned into a gas, in which case it was roughly as toxic as mustard gas. So, if there was ever an electrical fault in one of the machines that caused the coolant to boil off, there was a distinct possibility that you'd end up with a few dead operators.
Can anyone confirm/deny this? Actually, don't deny -- this is one of my best geek stories.
The power to sue a website is insignificant compared to the power of the /. effect.
Whoa! Beers are only $3? Holy Cow, I'm there -- out here in SF they check your credit when you get in line...
Alternatively, Universities could see the drop in interest as a sure sign that it's time to gut funding for these programs. Also, you might find yourself in a position where the departments are comprised of the morons too dense to realize that paying coding jobs are going the way of the dodo.
Wait until you see the property tax bill...